


Truce

by iktwabrokenbone (apiculteur)



Category: Bandom, Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Anxiety, M/M, Panic Attacks, Self Confidence Issues, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-12
Updated: 2015-03-12
Packaged: 2018-03-17 11:19:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3527363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiculteur/pseuds/iktwabrokenbone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tyler and Josh meet in high school. He doesn't realise how important Josh will soon be to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Truce

**Author's Note:**

> for this prompt:  
> A story where Josh and Tyler are in high school and how they meet and how they fall in love and become a band. Tyler has depression and is super self conscious and Josh helps him through it and yeah i know its probably been done multiple times but i dont think ive ever read one where it goes into detail about the starting of the band as well as falling in love during the process. Maybe even a scene of them like at their current popularity? Maybe it could be more than a thousand words?
> 
> title should be obvs

Days that were the worst for Tyler were days when he was conscious. Worse than even that were the days when he had to go to school. Unfortunately, he tended to have at least a brief period of consciousness everyday for as long as he could remember, and school was most days. It was disappointing usually, soul destroying sometimes.

Today was closer to soul destroying. Nothing unusual was happening- he had more free lessons than some days, in fact- but he was tired and all too aware of how lonely he was. A few months ago, he'd had friends, but their opinions on queer people had been too frustrating for him to bother with them any more. He ditched them and was left alone, not having the courage to introduce himself to people who would treat him well.

As much as he loved his family, it would be nice to have a friend who he wasn't related to. There were some things he couldn't speak to his family about, not easily at least. "Hey Mom, I'm really depressed and want a therapist but don't want you to have to pay for it when you already do so much for me!"

No. Tyler wasn't even sure if he could talk to friends about that kind of thing- in all honesty, he had never been friends with someone he genuinely trusted or liked.

Tyler probably wasn't doing much to encourage people to talk to him when he walked around with his shoulders hunched, eyes cast down and headphones in his ears, sometimes not even playing music. It wasn't that he wanted to scare anyone away, but rather that even the idea of talking to strangers made his stomach clench.

He hadn't yet put his headphones in when he was shoved into someone. Their heads clacked together painfully, and Tyler found himself clinging to his shoulders. "Sorry!" he said, releasing their shoulders as they turned around.

"No, dude, it's fine. Is your head okay?" the boy asked, giving him a friendly smile. Tyler was pretty sure they shared a few classes- unless there were more cute punk boys with faded pink hair and dark roots in the school. A part of Tyler thought that this guy was probably the only one.

"Yeah, I'm cool." Tyler said.

"Hi Cool, I'm Josh," he said, followed immediately by a deep sigh from the three people standing next to him.

"Every time," the girl with blonde and blue hair said, looking ashamed.

Josh laughed. "Is cool your birth name?"

"No, Tyler is," he said. "I've been thinking about changing it, though. Just testing it out, y'know?"

"Yeah, sure. You should keep it. It suits you," Josh said.

The girl who had spoken earlier cleared her throat loudly, smiling sweetly when they turned to five her. "Nice to meet you, Tyler. I'm Jenna."

"Hey," he smiled, feeling his heart ache slightly. He had known these people all of three minutes, didn't even know the names of the other two, but they seemed lovely. Funny and relaxed and generally great. For all that Tyler's old friends were bigoted, self-centred, and annoying, they were company, and Tyler missed just being able to talk and joke.

The other two, Mark and Debby, introduced themselves after Jenna, and Tyler fitted into their conversation easily. None of them were sending off any 'we've talked long enough, please leave' vibes, but all welcomed him, occasionally one of them rolling their eyes at something one of the others did and turning to Tyler. "They do this all the time. Constantly. It's disgusting."

The bell rang, and Tyler was reminded that he hardly knew these people. They would go to their separate classes and during break and lunch Tyler would be alone, itching to go up to talk to them but too afraid. Back to hunched shoulders in empty corners- it had been a nice fifteen minutes. This was why he shouldn't talk to people; too easily attached.

"Oh," Josh said, looking less enthusiastic as he remembered that lessons were a part of school. "What class you got, man? Maybe one of us shares it with you."

"Uh, history. With Miss Bolton," he said. It was half way through the year and he still struggled to recall.

Josh perked up. "Sweet, dude. Me and Debby are in that class."

"Which we're currently missing. C'mon, guys," Debby said, pressing a kiss to Jenna's cheek and giving Mark a wave as they walked in the direction of room thirty-five.

***

Somehow, luck was on Tyler's side. He thanked God when he saw Mark sitting alone in his next lesson, philosophy. Upon seeing Tyler, Mark nodded to the seat beside him. It was silly how much that made him happy, but it did. Maybe he was actually going to become friends with these people, all of whom were already more considerate and less narrow minded than his old 'friends'.

For the first sixteen years of his life, Tyler didn't have a best friend, didn't even have _friends_ , and within two months he was closer to Josh Dun than anyone else before. It was Mark who commented upon how different he acted around Josh.

"Like, usually, you're all hunched and kinda scared or sad or something, but around Josh you tend to stand straighter, and you make eye contact with him properly," he said. "It's weird, man, but good."

There was no real way to respond to that, not without giving away far too much. "Yeah. It's good," he echoed. In all honesty, he forgot when he was with Josh. His smiles and compliments and jokes were easy to focus on, blocking out memories of his ongoing chronic depression. He provided much needed distractions whenever Tyler was close to sinking back into deeper depression, pulled him up as best as he could.

He couldn't fix the chemical imbalance in his brain, but Josh, Mark, Jenna, and Debby all helped. Comforting words, someone to talk to, joke around with and feel more normal. None of them had seen him break down yet, though. Tyler wondered how they would act if they actually saw him broken, crying or hating himself more than usual.

Just another reason to try harder at pretending to be happy when he wasn't, to hold back his imminent break downs, delete his panicked texts, almost sent late at night or early in the morning. It was what he was used to, anyway.

***

The first time Tyler realised that he maybe had a bit of a crush on Josh was before they even spoke, when he first saw his messy hair and cute grin. The second was when they met properly, and Josh was completely sweet, trying his best to catch Tyler up on inside jokes. After they became friends, Tyler assumed that his half-crush had dissipated.

Alas, no. Tyler had never been that lucky before, and now was no different. This was shoved into his face when Josh came over to his house, and suggested that they play basketball together. Basketball made Josh very hot. Heat made Josh develop an aversion to clothes (Tyler had shied away at the suggestion of taking his shirt off, still fully dressed). Shirtless Josh made Tyler into one very queer, very sexually frustrated teen.

He couldn't handle this. Josh was too pretty and his abs were too perfect and Josh needed to be _arrested_ because all of this should be _illegal_. The lack of movement from Tyler was taken as a lack of interest, rather than the confused queerness that it actually was.

"We don't have to play if you don't want to," Josh said, stooping to pick up his shirt again. Once he was clothed, Tyler was more able to concentrate.

By now, it was a bit too late to insist that he did enjoy basketball. Instead, he laughed. "I guess I just do a lot of it. Mom teaches it and wants me to be good at it," Tyler said, which was true. Truth be told, he was tiring of it. When his mom started forcing him to do it, it stopped being a fun game as became a chore.

"Oh, sure. What do you like doing?" Josh asked him.

White silence filled Tyler's mind. Wasn't that just the question? He was sure that at a time, he would have been able to come out with a near endless list of things he liked to do without any thought. Now, he had to sift through the dusty corners of his mind. It was hard to tell when most things made him feel dull. "Music? I like the keyboard, I think."

The response had taken too long to be normal. Josh took it anyway. "Sweet. I'm a drummer," he said.

"Nice! We should start a band together," he joked. Keyboard, vocals, and drums would never make a good band. "Just the two of us. People would go wild. There would be so many- so many beefy men watching us."

Josh grinned. "I've always wanted to be watched by a group of beefy men."

"Yeah- I mean, yeah. I think it's a goal for most of us," Tyler said.

"We should play together sometime, for real. We could probably make some nice sounds," Josh said. "Like, I'm sure that less than half of the audience would throw up. But that's just- y'know, that's an estimate. It could be a lot more."

"Well, sometimes you've gotta take that risk."

They spent a few more seconds nodding seriously before they both started giggling. If nothing else, they had established that they could never be comedians.

***

One of the many things that Tyler had never done before meeting Josh was sleepovers. It seemed like a pretty normal thing for a child to do, an probably something they stopped doing by age sixteen, but Tyler had never been involved in one. A part of it was his homeschooling, but other than that, there was no real reason.

When Josh had found out, he was appalled, and the next day they were at Josh's house, lying on his bed with too much food. The TV was playing some badly made horror movie, since neither had been able to agree on a film. Mrs. Dun knocked on the door.

"Can I come in, boys?" she asked, which made Tyler want to laugh. It wasn't like she would open the door to them having passionate sex on the floor.

"Yeah," Josh said, and she peeked her head around the door.

"Hi!" she smiled at Tyler. "Just wanted to say that's it's eleven o'clock now, so maybe you should think about getting ready for bed? Stay up as long as you want, just don't be too noisy."

"Sure, Mom," Josh said, eyes still on the horror movie.

"Okay, bye then. Love you," she said, blowing a kiss and waving as she shut the door.

"Your mom's great," Tyler said.

"Yeah," he said, rolling off the bed and stripping off his clothes. By this point, Tyler had seen Josh shirtless many times- he didn't like feeling hot, and he did a lot of sports and drumming. If he let his eyes drift to his exposed shoulders, well, it's not like Josh was uncomfortable with that.

The only surprising thing about this time was that he pulled off his pants too, left standing in only his underwear. At Tyler's shocked expression, he began to look sheepish. "Oh, sorry, I can wear a shirt and sweatpants over this if you want?" he suggested.

"N-no, it's cool," Tyler said. Josh relaxed at that at sat back down on the bed.

Tyler's stomach twisted at the realisation that he would have to change in front of Josh. As much as he loved him, that didn't mean he wanted to change in front of him. He was too skinny and tan and bony.

"Oh, hey, the bathroom is the first door on the left. You can change in there," Josh told him, and Tyler smiled gratefully.

Being so bare around anyone, Josh included, was not something he was ready for.

***

Tyler woke up feeling like he was chocking. Nothing new, but it never got any easier. He stumbled to the bathroom, squeezing his eyes shut against the burning light. It felt wrong, being in a bright room so late at night, staring at his own tired image.

God, was he tired. Not just because it was early and he had been struggling to sleep for the past... How long? It could've been days or years. Everything blurred together. All he knew was that he was tired, red rimmed eyes and exhausted emotionally. The nightmares ate away at him, as did the pressure to get good grades and to be great at basketball and to get a job which would pay him well (he didn't want that, he didn't want that, he wanted music to be his job). Tyler was breaking.

Dull eyes looked back at him as he regained his breath, holding himself up by the sink. A dripping tap and a half-broken clock were the sound track to his early morning realisations.

He didn't want to be alive. He was numb and miserable and hadn't cried in months. Any life in him had faded some time ago. There was nothing he was living for. Music? It wouldn't know if he died. His friends? People got over these things. Josh, his family? Guilt alone could not keep his heart beating. Already, his lungs struggled to grasp at polluted air, and it was helpless. All of this. Helpless, hopeless, an army of men stood in front of a tsunami, guns brandished and muffs on their ears to drown out the truth.

This would not work. This could not work.

Josh walked in to him collapsed on the floor, concave chest crushing out his breath in unsteady sobs. "Tyler?" he asked, alarmed. His head was buried in his hands, so he could only feel Josh sit down beside him, didn't even hear his footsteps over his tears. "What's wrong?"

"I don't want to be alive. I don't want to be alive and I don't know why I'm not dead yet. I don't want to be alive." His words were broken up, soon becoming a sleep-slurred chant, the same thing whispered over and over for no reason other than he didn't know what to say.

Josh was saying something, he knew, but he wasn't listening. Something about how things  _would_ get better, and how he loved Tyler, and people would miss him.

"I know!" he cried out. "I know they'd miss me! That's most of the reason why I'm not dead yet, but I _don't want to be alive_ , and I'm never going to be happy, because I'm not a happy person and I can't remember ever _not_ being like this, and I can't remember ever not being afraid to talk to strangers, and I can't remember anything else. I can't. I can't. I want to be dead. Stop telling me to live."

It lasted another two hours. At first, mainly Josh trying to comfort him and Tyler getting angry, but later he couldn't be bothered to be angry. He was broken down. It was just tearful hugs, then dull cuddling. Tyler didn't have any emotions left in him. Someone could perform major surgery on him and he would be too tired to even register the pain.

At some point, Josh carried him back to his bed, and they must have fallen asleep too, but he couldn't remember it. The next morning, it wasn't discussed, but Tyler clung to him more, and Josh was more eager to jump to defend Tyler after that.

A month later, when Josh was the broken one, and everything felt wrong, because he always seemed so _invincible_ , Tyler hugged him tight. He had no idea what to do in situations like this. He had never been good at comforting, but he tried for Josh's sake, and the gentle, sad smile Josh gave him afterwards showed he appreciated it. Maybe neither were the best at consoling, but they were both trying, and that would have to be enough until they got better.

***

Boring autumn days were the best way to be productive. Josh was stuck at Tyler's house until the rain let up, and as fun as talking was, sometimes they didn't want to talk for hours on end. In the corner of Tyler's room, there was a keyboard trapped under loose sheets of paper. It wasn't that Tyler hadn't played in a long time, but rather that he was very disorganised. In actual fact, he had practised only the day before. The papers made it more hidden, though, and Josh hadn't ever noticed it before. Unless he remembered there joking promise to start a band, he wouldn't even know Tyler played keyboard.

Josh moved away the papers and flipped the switch on. After several painful, incorrect chords, Tyler pulled up a chair beside him. "Have you ever played the keyboard?" Tyler asked, already pretty sure that the answer was 'no'.

"Yeah? I'm a complete pro. Like, I'm better than Jimi Hendrix," Josh said, and Tyler snorted.

"Really? He's like, wow. Jimi is so good at the keyboard," Tyler said, smiling widely. Josh could always make him smile with the weird things he said.

"Dude, if you think you're better, prove it," Josh said, moving his chair to the side.

"Sure." It took him a minute to collect a song in his mind, settling upon a relatively short and simple song. The idea for it had came into his mind a few days after Josh's first panic attack in front of him, when Tyler was finally feeling a sense of calm acceptance. Depressed, but not as bad as he once once. It was slow and pretty, the lyrics he murmured along to it up-front about their meaning. A work in progress, but good enough for Josh to look different when Tyler turned to him.

Nothing happened, and then Josh was kissing him, unexpected and firm but still tender. Tyler had hardly even realised that _Josh was kissing him, finally_ , before he pulled away. The apologies would come spilling out of his lips if Tyler didn't stop him, and a kiss seemed the best way to silence him. It was a bit confused, slightly too emotional after sharing such a personal song with Josh, and the angle was terrible, but it was pleasant. Great, actually. With anyone else, it would be a bit crap, but it was _Josh_ who had kissed him first.

They broke apart (nothing like the other times they had broken apart, nothing painful or bad) and stayed wordless for a few moments. It wasn't awkward. Immediately filling the silence would have been awkward.

"Was that song about...?" Josh asked. He didn't have to finish the sentence. They both already knew.

"Yeah."

Josh replicated the first three chords, once again discordant and wrong. "One day, you'll play that in front of people," he said. "Hundreds of people who will all know the words."

"You'll be there, too," Tyler said. He didn't quite believe that would bed happen, but if it did, Josh would be there.

He got a nod, and a few days later, they were somehow dating and in a band.

***

Four thousand people. Four thousand people were watching him and Josh, singing back the words. _Truce_. They didn't know what it meant, not what it meant to him and Josh, but they had given it their own meaning. They had taken the words Tyler had offered them and made them into something that was important to _them_ , and that made the song so much more. It wasn't just late nights with Josh during high school, it was everyone else's late nights or early mornings or sore throats or wet eyes.

Mark filmed them from the side of the stage, and it was surreal. From scribbling his words into the palm of his hand in history class, to whispering them to Josh, to thousands of people shouting them back at him. None of this felt real, but the squeeze Josh gave his shoulder assured him.

This was real, and it meant everything to him.

**Author's Note:**

> im sry for that ending and the lack of writing lately!!! ive been v depressed, which was a barrel of laughs!!!! haha yea, i do love that numb, dead-inside feeling!!! :))


End file.
